Post

Mayor Frey says the city has been "drastically undercounting the dollar figure necessary in the budget to complete those [police] overtime hours... for as long as I can remember." What he means is "the whole time I've been mayor."

22 reposts163 likes

one would think that a 3rd term mayor would understand that the pen (writing a budget) is mightier than the sword (having the chamber of commerce purchase a strong-mayor amendment to the city charter)

Portland Police do the same thing. They complained about getting a smaller budget increase, referring to it as a cut. Multiple officers are among the most highly paid employees after OT. They have tons of open positions, for years, and won't fill them but say they need more money for new officers.

When he was Council Member the mayor recognized and addressed this issue in her budgets, being open and transparent about it and its impact on other services and the tax levy. Took heat for it, too, but by golly those budgets were structurally balanced.

(Structurally balanced means ongoing dollars for ongoing services and one-time dollars for one-time expenditures, including not pretending police overtime wasn’t ongoing.)

Frey's defense is, we're spending about what we would've spent if MPD had 888 officers. Does that mean the department has a budget for 888 officers? "No."

Frey: "it's a fair argument to say let's transparently account for the actual costs of [police] overtime. Or at least estimate the actual cost of overtime." But to say we don't need to spend this money on police overtime is not a fair argument.

Question about why his budgets have so drastically underestimated police overtime. Frey points to how understaffed MPD is. Staffing per capita is among lowest in country. He doesn't say why this reality, which has existed for many years, was not reflected in his budgets.

Frey says spending is the equivalent of MPD having hundreds more officers than they actually do. "what it shows is, it was not actually an overspend at all." He's in his third term and still getting the hang of the concept of a budget.